All posts tagged Barcelona

The Barcelona meet-up turned out to be one of the busiest, which probably tells us something about the disconnect between the ecosystem in the city, and the community of start-ups.

In terms of sheer numbers, more entrepreneurs pitched here than in any city so far, and by a reasonable margin. Furthermore, the number of people who pitched was much higher. So while there may have been more people attending the Berlin meet-up, fewer actually wanted to tell the world about their company.

What does that tell us?

It is certainly true that some of those who pitched were not — and had no intention of being — global players. But the overall quality and range of the ideas presented was on par with other Western European city.

Spain’s tech start-up scene is up and coming, but lacks key elements, says the man in charge of the accelerator program put together by Telefónica, the country’s biggest company.

Gary Stewart, a graduate of Yale Law school who gave up law to become an entrepreneur in Madrid, was chosen to run Telefónica’s Wayra program, an eight-nation program across Spain and Latin America to help build tech ecosystems.

By the end of this year, Wayra will take place in: Colombia, Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Venezuela and Chile. Telefónica’s target is to select 10 projects in each country to back. Each will receive around $30,000 and $70,000 and will be under their wing for six months. In return, Telefonica will take an equity stake in each company they support.

The idea was the brain child of José María Álvarez-Pallete, chief executive of Telefónica Latin America.

BARCELONA — For the past 13 years, Barcelona has been ranked first in the European Cities Monitor list of the best European cities for workers’ quality of life. It isn’t hard to see why.

Furthermore, according to official city figures, the rate of entrepreneurial activity surpasses the European average, and even passes that of Germany.

But such figures relate to all entrepreneurial activity and not the tech sector specifically. Alas, the sunny picture presented by the official figures is rather cloudier in tech.

Gary Stewart is the director of Telefónica SA’s new Wayra project, an ambitious accelerator program from the country’s telecommunications giant that is designed to kick start Spain’s underdeveloped high-tech entrepreneur culture. An American, Mr. Stewart was running his own start-up before being selected to direct the mobile operator’s incubator program. He says that more than 600 entrepreneurs bid for a place on the program.

Most start-ups struggle to come up with one viable idea, but Barcelona-based Worldsensing had a different problem: choosing which of its three high-technology systems to take to market.

Chief Executive Ignasi Vilajosana Guillen and chief technology officer Mischa Dohler had to choose whether to focus on the oil and gas world, with inventions for seismic research and a product to remotely sense strain in cables, or whether they wanted to push ahead with a sensor and gateway system that helps cities implement smart parking.

“It is just not possible to run three products,” said Mr. Dohler.

Although the seismic research invention was impressive and had great potential, they ultimately decided to focus on the parking project. “Oil and gas is a game for the big boys. We are not one of the big boys,” he said.

Their remote sensor program is still being developed in parallel, and is providing real income, but they have brought their focus onto smart cities and their parking project. “We went for smart cities because we believe it is a huge market,” Mr. Dohler says.

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Tech Europe covers Europe’s technology leaders, their companies, and the people and industries that support them — and their ideas. The blog is edited by Ben Rooney, with contributions from The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires.